LifeViewer

If you might be interested in using LifeViewer for either animated or still images, here's a very quick recent summary of how to do that, from the forums. It seems like it will probably look better than PNG or animated GIF images. The ones you've uploaded recently seem to be a little gray or blurry sometimes -- probably Golly's standard off-white background rather than the LifeWiki's solid white?
The best way to get all the LifeViewer syntax right is probably to copy the syntax from an existing article with an infobox that's already in the right category. For example, period-256 glider gun could be used as a basis for your new stub entry period-156 glider gun.

You can copy in the syntax, make the appropriate changes to the infobox attributes, and just keep previewing until it looks right. For inline images not in the infobox, copy the syntax from an article that has embedded LifeViewer images, like buckaroo.

It's possible to change Golly's background color to plain white, in Preferences > Color (different for each algorithm). It would probably make for nicer-looking animated GIFs.

However, we're definitely trying to get away from adding animated GIFs to the LifeWiki, just because it's not easy to get the pattern back out of the GIF again if you want to run it or edit it in Golly. The nice thing about LifeViewer is that you can upload the RLE to a page in the RLE: namespace, and then it becomes available to anyone by just opening the LifeViewer pop-up window and hitting Ctrl+C.

You also save some steps with giffer.lua, resizing, and uploading. And then the resulting images all have the standard LifeWiki pattern style, without any extra effort.

User-created patterns
Although LifeWiki hopes to expand and catalogue everything there is to know about
the Game of Life, users are generally discouraged from adding patterns that they
themselves constructed, in order to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
There are of course exceptions, such as when the constructed pattern
is of clear notability.

It's a little painful to follow this rule sometimes, especially when you really want something of yours to show up in the LifeWiki and nobody else is stepping up to do the work... but it's probably less painful than getting articles deleted after you've spent the time writing them, on the annoying grounds of "non-notability". Dvgrn (talk) 16:26, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

----end quote----

If you'll check the Recent Changes log, you'll see that I've spent quite a bit of time following along and repairing minor damage. I certainly don't want to revoke your trusted status, since you're pointing out a lot of details that it makes sense to include in the various articles. But could you please slow down the pace a bit, and double-check your edits so that other people won't have to clean up your changes so often?

The Simkin Glider Gun Breeder and the two p165 MWSS guns pretty definitely shouldn't have their own articles. You can move them to your user pages if you want, just don't include links to them from the regular LifeWiki pages. I've added proposed-deletion tags to the articles, so if anyone disagrees about the deletion, they'll be able to speak up about it over the next two weeks.

To try to explain why these patterns don't belong among the "notable" patterns catalogued by the LifeWiki: there are easily thousands of ways to build p165 MWSS guns that are smaller or lower-population than your two discoveries. Imagine if thousands of people each wanted their own discoveries on the LifeWiki, and each one uploaded p165 MWSS gun 2, 3, 4, ... 1998, 1999... -- all with just as much claim to a place on the LifeWiki as your patterns. The Category:Guns page would very quickly become unusable, with no way to sort through the piles of random patterns to find the ones that someone might actually want to know about.

LifeViewer (2)

The best way to use LifeViewer is to find an article that already uses it, and copy what it does. For embedded viewers, experiment on your user pages if you need to, or just use the Preview feature a lot. You can't just add RLE in a code block, as you tried in 122P80.1. It goes in a separate namespace. You would just type in something like "RLE:period80toadhassler" in the LifeWiki search field, create that page, paste the RLE in there, and save.

Then "period80toadhassler" becomes the "pname" that you would use, either in the infobox template or in "EmbedViewer" attributes. See the buckaroo article for an example, or just do a search on "EmbedViewer".

To figure out how to use LifeViewer's waypoint scripting commands to create loops, pans, zooms, and other animations, look at existing examples again (search on "viewerconfig"). Or launch LifeViewer, hit 'H', and scroll down to see the list of available scripting commands. Dvgrn (talk) 12:36, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Raw RLE in RLE: namespace

You wrote in a checkin comment: "How ... do I make this an actual RLE???" That's a very reasonable question, and it gave me trouble the first time around also.

There are several answers. If you want to be able to copy the RLE out, you can do one of two things: 1) add the pname to an embedded or infobox LifeViewer, and then launch LifeViewer and hit Ctrl+C to move the RLE to the clipboard; or 2) go back to RLE:Infinitegliderhotel5, hit the Edit button, and copy the text out of the textbox. The RLE looks fine in edit mode, just not when you're looking at the "article" and MediaWiki tries to interpret the leading #s and ignore the newlines and so on.

If you want that RLE to get uploaded to the LifeWiki, so it's available for download in the same way that (say) the RLE for 'buckaroo' is -- that's a slightly harder problem, still a work in progress. It used to be only Nathaniel could do that, so you'd send the RLE files to him in an email. But that doesn't work so well any more, so we're looking for a better way.

Anyway, I hope to be able to make copies of all the RLE in RLE:{pname} namespace articles, periodically, in some automated way, and upload them to the LifeWiki pattern collection, with appropriate comments and links. But I haven't taken the time to set up that system yet (and I'm not sure exactly how I'll do it!)

So in the meantime, creating raw RLE articles ( RLE:{pname} ) is basically a request to the admins to upload the same RLE to the server. Eventually all of these will also be available at http://www.conwaylife.com/patterns/{pname}.rle -- just not sure exactly when. Dvgrn (talk) 01:34, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

A note re: the tracking category --- private discussion revealed that it's (probably) working fine, so long as rle=true (which indicates that an uploaded RLE file is present for a pattern, rather than an on-wiki RLE snippet) is not passed when there is not, in fact, an uploaded RLE file.

The reason why this parameter exists in the first place is that it's not possible to programmatically check for the presence or absence of off-wiki files using MediaWiki's templates, built-ins and parser functions. This also means that the infobox templates blindly trust the parameter (they have to, really).

This might be a rule with some exceptions, though. I've been adding a lot of new articles recently from Lexicon Release 29, where I have in fact included rle=true in the infobox parameters, in the absence of any uploaded file. I consider these to be works in progress, and am promising to solve the missing-RLE problem... relatively soon. I just don't want to have to go back and find all those articles again and add the rle=true later! So far no one has been complaining, since the RLE can be retrieved from the RLE: namespace, or by Ctrl+C from inside a launched LifeViewer.

I'd almost say that if an on-wiki RLE snippet is present, it's okay to include rle=true for now, because that will allow the article to be included in a cleanup sweep by an automated script that creates and uploads all the missing RLE files. If you put in nofile=true, then it will just have to be edited again later... I suppose any further discussion along these lines is probably a topic for the Tiki bar, not a subsection of Entity Valkyrie's user page! Dvgrn (talk) 13:35, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Moving pages

BTW, when someone (i.e. User:Sokwe, who's probably the closest we have to a deletionist) proposes deletion of an entry, e.g. on grounds of an oscillator not being the smallest of its period etc., and you'd like for the page to be moved rather than deleted outright, it's best to ask for this to be done by an admin (or anyone who has permission to move wiki pages, but I think it's just admins on the LifeWiki). Performing a proper page move keeps its history etc., allows for the move to be undone if community consensus later determines that a main-namespace-article is warranted after all, etc., so it's preferable to simply recreating the page in your userspace. Apple Bottom (talk) 11:27, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Re: non-notable pages -- it's not a problem, everybody makes mistakes early on... unless they just lurk and don't try to help out at all, in which case the LifeWiki never gets improved. It's kind of painful to do work and then have it immediately proposed for deletion, so if you survive that experience, you learn pretty quickly what edits will be accepted and what is doomed to be reverted. I took the liberty of moving "eater 6" to your user page. There's some more explanation of why, at User_talk:Entity_Valkyrie/Eater_6.

Thanks for your efforts so far! There's been quite a bit of cleanup I've followed along and done in various articles -- I'd appreciate it if you'd check Recent Changes and try to be careful not to do the same things again (too often), because it's hard for me to find time to keep up sometimes. But overall the result has been that you've contributed quite a bit of useful detail that wasn't there before.

And now you can make LifeViewer work, which is more than most people have taken the time to learn...! Dvgrn (talk) 10:52, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Another detail that will hopefully be useful: when you're filling in a template and you have no idea about the bothersome heat, volatility, or strict volatility parameters, you can run the pattern in question through Jason Summers' Oscillizer utility and it will tell you everything -- also including period and minimum population and so on.

I added references in a couple of formats to the 34p14 shuttle page that you created. Once the heat and volatility are no longer "Unknown", it seems like this page could be done -- the stub tag could be removed. (Maybe to be really up-to-date it would be good to use Apple Bottom's nice CiteCatagolue template instead of a plain generic CiteWeb, but it's okay to do plain web references if you don't want to dig up the alternate reference syntax).

Seems to me that it makes perfect sense to use your p28 glider shuttle in the 34p14 article, as a great example of how the pattern can reflect gliders. That will get the pattern into the LifeWiki's big pattern collection eventually, too. But the "p28 glider shuttle" pattern doesn't really seem like a new standalone discovery. Also, if anyone needed to be listed as the discoverer, it would probably be Sokwe, who found and posted the reflection reaction... not so much to the first person who happened to paste four of them in a loop.

So it's a useful pattern to add to the RLE: namespace, but not every pattern needs its own separate article. I think it works well as an example in the 34p14 shuttle article (and I hope everyone more or less agrees with me, but I don't really know that yet!) Dvgrn (talk) 12:04, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

I was looking EVERYWHERE for a link to that page! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

In the context of a snacker this eater does have slightly better clearance, so I've moved it back to the main namespace for now. Other people may still want to move it back, but let's give it another try now that it isn't called something quite as dangerous as "eater 6".

No doubt there are piles of other eaters with 22 bits, so this still isn't really a very good unique name. On the other hand, probably nobody else will be using "22-bit eater" to refer to any other eater, so we might get away with this particular neologism, more or less.

This all still seems to me to be not entirely necessary, though. If a lot of people had ever needed a way to refer to this super-specialized eater, it would have a name already. The fact that it doesn't have a name is a fairly good sign that it doesn't really need one. It has had a place in the snacker article for years already, and that's the main place where the thing is actually useful.

In any case, please don't go overboard on this kind of thing! For example, it doesn't seem like a good idea to mention this object in every article describing a mechanism with two replaceable eaters -- Fx153, Callahan G-to-H, etc. Usually there's no particular reason to make this replacement, and plenty of reasons not to -- increased population, decreased glider constructibility, potential confusion about whether this custom-looking catalyst is really required, etc.

As a general rule, please resist the temptation to make links from pages in the main namespace to pages in your User namespace. If an article doesn't belong in the main namespace, then a link to it doesn't belong there either.

Notability Revisited

It's probably worth reiterating the guideline* in Lifewiki:Pattern_pages: please think twice (or three or four times) before doing what you've done here. You invented a name for a pattern on your own, without seeing other people using it anywhere. Then you created a separate article that used that new name, and then a link with that new name.

If nobody else has ever used a name, it's really not too likely to be a good idea to add the name to the LifeWiki anywhere outside your User pages. If someone else invented a name, and several people on the forums or elsewhere have used that name over a reasonably long period of time, then it makes a lot more sense for you to create an article on it.

In other words, please try to avoid documenting your own discoveries and your own nomenclature. You can certainly suggest new names on the forums, and try to get other people to use those names and even create wiki articles about them. But it's better to not be in a hurry about this kind of thing. If nobody picks up on your suggestions, please take that as a strong hint. Names that are not in common use very quickly become a maintenance nightmare. It's quite possible that nobody else seems too excited about some suggested terminology, just because nobody can think of a reason to actually use it.

Yes, I just edited the guideline to try and make this point about names... if there isn't general agreement on this point, I expect someone will correct me! Dvgrn (talk) 15:55, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

discoverer=Unknown

For future reference, if the discoverer or discovery year of a pattern is unknown, the parameter should just be left out of the infobox template entirely. It'll still show up as "Unknown" on the actual page, but it won't create an ugly redlink. Thanks! Ian07 (talk) 01:07, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Yes, in which case it's best to just get rid of the parameter so that the wiki doesn't think it was found by a person named "Unknown." Ian07 (talk) 01:13, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Put only one form of a pattern in the infobox

The infobox should only contain one form of a pattern (usually the simplest or smallest form). You have recently edited RLE:Jsp36 and RLE:F171 to include multiple forms. Instead, you should put the alternate form in a new section on the page. For examples, see snacker, 37P10.1, or dinner table.~Sokwe 06:58, 3 November 2018

Notability Revisited Again

Unfortunately, you don't seem to have properly read/understood what Dvgrn said a few sections up. Please try to re-read it. It's great that you're trying to help out in the wiki, but you keep on making the same mistakes. In the future, please do not create pages for terminology that you have made up yourself. Make sure it's turned up at least once in the forums/Lexicon (if not more like 5-10 times), before creating a page.

Recently you've created a lot of pages where the names have never been used before by anyone else, such as Snarkless, Penta-boojum, and Crossgun_reaction. I can agree that the latter two likely deserve pages, so thanks for bringing that to people's attention. However, as mentioned by Dvgrn, you really should discuss these names on the forums a long time before you add them to the wiki. There might already be a name for a "Crossgun_reaction", and Kazyan as the discoverer really should get to name "Penta-boojum".

Lastly, you seem to be able to do quite a lot of wiki editing in a day. Since you are a "a newcomer on LifeWiki and can't tell if a pattern is notable or not", it would be helpful if you do not link new articles that you created from lots of other pages. Just wait a bit so others can agree that the new pages are notable, and then link them from other pages. Time to quote Apple Bottom.

User Pages

I added a section in my user page for the terminology I used, just like Wwei23 for replicators. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs) 10:29, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

For terms you've personally made up without getting general agreement on them first, moving your articles to your user space is a good start. They should really be created in your user space in the first place (if anywhere).

You've been leaving cleanup work only half-done sometimes, which means other people have to follow around after you and pick up after messes you make. Eventually someone may be tempted to try revoking the trusted flag on your account for a while, just to cut down on the damage rate to where it's possible for all us part-time volunteers to keep up. That would seem like an unfriendly way to get your attention, but at least it's sure to work...!

Today's half-finished cleanup, for example, includes a whole new section added to the Game of Life Status Page. "Snarkless" seems to be a category that only you have shown an interest in so far. And yet there's a link to "snarkless" in the new section, which goes to a redirect in the main namespace, which leads people to the article on your user page.

Any followable link in a main namespace article implies that it's recognized terminology that is in common use. So there shouldn't be any links in main namespace articles that point to user pages... but that's what keeps happening when you create and then move pages, especially if you don't check the box that suppresses the creation of a (main namespace) redirect. Dvgrn (talk) 13:59, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

The only reason that I originally let other people move this is because I didn't know how to move back then. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

Signing talk page messages

In case you didn't already know, adding a signature to talk page messages is as easy as typing four tildes (~) in a row at the end of your message:

Moving pages (to user namespace)

@Entity Valkyrie, if you move any more pages from the main namespace to your user pages, as you did with the quinti-Snark pages today, please be careful to first uncheck the checkbox that says "Leave a redirect behind".

Otherwise you're just leaving a mess that someone else has to clean up. Redirects shouldn't be left in the main namespace that point to articles in the user namespace, any more than there should be main-namespace article links that point there. Dvgrn (talk) 03:01, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't see a checkbox for the redirect. The only ones I see are "Move associated talk page" and "Watch source page and target page." Are you sure it's not restricted to administrators? Ian07 (talk) 03:59, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Interesting! No, I'm not sure at all -- it just looks like all the other options to me, and I hadn't run into this situation before.

In that case there's nothing much to be done, except that it would be helpful if the person moving the page could also tag the inevitable redirect page with a {{speedydeletion|reason for deletion}} tag. At least, I don't think this is really the kind of thing that the Proposed Deletion mechanism was designed for, and I don't want to bother waiting around fourteen days to do such a trivial cleanup.

I've cavalierly modified the deletion guidelines to cover this case, so if anyone disagrees, please feel free to speak up on any of the relevant Talk pages. The current guidelines say anyone can request the two-week period on a redirect's Talk page as soon as the Speedy Deletion tag shows up. Sound OK? Dvgrn (talk) 12:12, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

I now feel like due to all these non-notable pages, I'm useless at contribution to the wiki now. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 05:01, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

I disagree! You're definitely difficult to keep up with sometimes, but you have lots of new ideas on what should be added to existing pages. It's really interesting to have that perspective. People who have been around here too long often just think, "Oh, everybody knows that". But then if someone new shows up and tries to figure out a subject starting from scratch with a LifeWiki article, there are all kinds of subtle pieces missing that aren't explained anywhere.

The LifeWiki is a collaborative effort, so there's bound to be disagreement sometimes about whether specific changes are a good idea or not. That's not a bad thing, though it's bound to be annoying sometimes. Everyone has to fit their ideas into one common LifeWiki, so eventually a consensus emerges (unless someone forks the project and we end up with two LifeWikis, but luckily I don't think that's likely to happen.)

For example, when I was in the middle of doing a lot of Life-Lexicon-related editing a while back, I took shortcuts a few times and put two different versions of a pattern into a single infobox. Based on a comment Sokwe made recently, I now think that was probably a mistake -- alternate versions should go into embedded viewers, and keep the infobox cleaner.

Anyway, you've been doing a lot of editing that is not creating whole new pages. Probably whenever you create a new page outside of your User namespace, about a pattern or name that you made up yourself, the page is going to continue to get moved or deleted, based on the general consensus. But you don't have to keep doing that. Dvgrn (talk) 11:56, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Sparker categories

Just wanted to let you know I just made a new template for the sparker period categories:

{{SparkerPeriod|p=#}}

where # is the period for that category. It adds both of the navboxes and adds it to all the relevant higher categories. Ian07 (talk) 15:12, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Recovery times

You recently changed the Lx65's recovery time from 57 to 34. 34 is the absolute-minimal "instant appearance" recovery time -- you'd have to make the second Herschel magically appear in the input location and delete the first natural glider very early somehow, in both the input and output locations.

The problem is, when you replace "57" with "34" you're destroying useful information and replacing it with much-less-useful information. That "57" was in the article for a good reason: if you want to build generic Herschel circuitry, you can use Lx65 conduits without worrying, as long as you don't have any signals closer together than 57 ticks. Yes, there might theoretically be special cases where this could be reduced by suppressing the output Herschel's FNG somehow, for making true period fifty-something guns -- but that's a very very special case at best.

That special case could be called out in the text if you really want to, but really it seems like pointless theoretically hand-waving unless it's accompanied by an illustration of an actual circuit that can process sub-p57 Lx65 conduits. I don't think that's going to be very easy in practice. The catalysts in the Lx65 don't leave a lot of room to reach in and suppress the FNGs, but if you don't do that then 57 really is the minimum period.

I'm mostly writing this because your 57-to-34 change implies that you might consider changing the recovery times of all the other conduits to their "instant-appearance" values -- 35 ticks for the Fx77, for example. Please don't do that, and in general please be careful not to remove useful information when you're adding special-case details. Dvgrn (talk) 12:09, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

By the way, even the Fx77 is 51, not 57. All of this ignores the FNG. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 22:16, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Notability Revisited Once Again

Nothing that I made is notable... Entity Valkyrie (talk) 03:54, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

That's not necessarily true. The most recent gun pattern that you made an page for did end up in the 30P5H2V0 article, for example. Minstrel 4 is certainly notable. Your key discovery in the p13-assisted period-52 glider gun is notable. P49 bumper loop and P57 bumper loop... well, it would have been better if someone else had created those articles, but they're certainly notable enough to deserve their own pages, along with all the other current record-setters listed in Oscillator.

For someone who only showed up on the conwaylife.com forums just over a year ago, that's really a fairly impressive list. It generally takes a year or more to establish a new discovery's notability, and it's much better not to rush the process. If people mention a pattern regularly, and if they use it in their own constructions, then someone might want to look up that pattern by name... and then it belongs on the LifeWiki. But those things are not going to happen instantly the moment you post something -- and for most patterns it never happens at all, and that's perfectly okay.

It's a paradoxical Zen kind of thing: as long as it's really important to you that your patterns have to be notable, they probably won't be. But if you stop worrying about it and just keep doing interesting stuff, you'll probably find your work popping up here and there on the LifeWiki (documented by someone other than yourself).

I moved the User:Entity Valkyrie/P960 30P5H2V0 gun to your user namespace, not because it's definitely non-notable, but because the Three-Step Checklist says that you should definitely not have created it. If someone else besides you decides to move that article back to the main namespace, I'm guessing everyone will be perfectly happy for it to stay there. But as long as you insist on over-advertising your own inventions, somebody is probably going to keep moving those articles out of the main namespace.

The problem is that if people -- not just you, but every new user that thinks they've made something wonderful -- get in the habit of putting up articles about their own inventions, it sets a hugely dangerous precedent for the LifeWiki. Pretty soon it becomes very hard to find actual relevant or useful stuff on the Category pages amid all the clutter.

Take gun patterns, for example. You've made quite a few articles about your various gun patterns. If everyone did that for every gun pattern they made, we would easily have more articles in Category:Guns than we currently have in the entire LifeWiki -- and almost all of those patterns would be sub-optimal, oversized, out-of-date, and really not particularly interesting to anyone. But they'd probably stick around forever anyway, because it would be too much work to clean them all up. Gun-building has a long history, but it can't be adequately documented on the LifeWiki.

Luckily it turns out that none of this is a serious problem as long as everyone follows the Three-Step Checklist. So please follow the Three-Step Checklist. It will make your fellow LifeWiki editors' lives a lot easier. Dvgrn (talk) 14:41, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Next time when I make a page about my own pattern, I will make it as a User:Entity Valkyrie page. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 21:08, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Please stop adding your personal flair to patterns

I had to correct RLE:Duelingbanjosp24gun because you changed a block on table to an eater on table. I similarly had to correct RLE:bronco because you used a 22-cell still life instead of two eaters. When adding patterns to the wiki, please use a more standard form. Generally, if you are adding someone else's pattern from the forums, do not change it.~Sokwe 05:29, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Along somewhat the same lines as above: I'm probably going to have to revert most of the changes you made just now to the Sir Robin article, unless you'd be so kind as to do the cleanup yourself.

Please refer to your very own Three-Step Checklist, in relation to this new term "middleweight minstrel". No one besides you has used the term. The object in question already has a name that has been accepted by the object's discoverer. Why make a big confusing mess by adding a competing name all over the place -- without even proposing it in the obvious place first?

This is not just a rhetorical question; I'd really appreciate a careful and considered answer from you about this. Your Three-Step Checklist is as clear and simple as I can make it. It has universal support among current LifeWiki editors as far as I know. Please take it seriously.

I also don't see why your addition of lots of words to the "indecomposable tagalongs" table is an improvement, and you've added at least one grammatical mess ("All spaceships in the on that line..."), but those are relatively minor issues. Dvgrn (talk) 11:14, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

And again along the same lines: I'd also appreciate a response here about your reasons for adding this irrelevant detail to the 2-engine Cordership article.

Your work on the LifeWiki continues to be a puzzling mixture of good contributions and wild tangents, to the point where several other LifeWiki editors' time and attention is needed to clean up after your occasional unpredictable random edits. It would be great if you could put a little more thought into your work, and only make changes that you're 99% sure will not make more work for anyone else.

Also, attempts to get you to respond to questions have usually failed -- and that means that it's hard to understand what you're thinking, and even harder to be sure that you're listening to suggestions.

Mentioning eater2s instead of eater1s as an option for the Cordership eater doesn't make any sense. People familiar with eaters will already know that eater2s can pretty much always be substituted for eater1s -- and people new to the subject might think that your added sentence is useful information somehow, and then they'll have to try to figure out _why_ it's useful information. They're bound to fail at this, because there just aren't any common situations where an eater2 would be any kind of improvement on an eater1 in this circuit. An eater2 completely covers the space taken up by an eater1, so you might as well just use the eater1s. If eater2s are worth a mention, why not eleveners or integrals or the hundreds of other eaters that would also work in that location?

Your point about eater2s not needing "reorientating" might make a small amount of sense in the context of someone trying to memorize this circuit and re-draw a functional Corderhip eater from memory -- but people don't actually do that kind of thing much, and anyone reading this article might as well just copy and paste the eater1s.

Time for a thought experiment. Suppose instead of reverting your change, I had instead added another couple of sentences:

"Using eater 3s instead of eater 2s would work, too, and eater 3s also do not need to be reoriented. Furthermore, it's possible to use tetramers of eater 3s as follows:

2-engine Cordership eater. The eater1scan also be replaced with eater 3s,but that's an even worse idea. (click above to open LifeViewer)

Four of these in a diamond shape would allow 2-engine Corderships coming from all four intercardinal directions to be eaten successfully."

In just exactly the same way as an eater2 is pointlessly bigger than an eater1, this eater3 tetramer monstrosity is pointlessly bigger than an eater2. If this got added to the 2-engine Cordership article, someone would have to revert it out again. The information is technically true, but it's a wild tangent that makes the article a little harder to read and doesn't add anything useful to it.

Does that make sense? In a way I'm trying to add a version of the Golden Rule to your Three-Step Checklist. For each edit, ask yourself first what would happen if other people did what you're doing. Are you adding something that might be useful to know in the context of the article, or are you really just adding a piece of random trivia that has caught your attention, but that the article is really better off without? If there are hundreds of possible additions similar to yours, you'd probably find it annoying if a hundred people each made one of those additions to the article -- "Moose antlers work too!" "So do fourteeners!". If you find yourself on a slippery slope like that in the future, please resist the impulse to take the first step down it.

Don't forget to sign your response by typing four tildes at the end of it (and nothing else). Dvgrn (talk) 12:16, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Ah, got it. Well, my apologies for the unnecessarily long essay, then, and thanks for the response! I had wrongly guessed that your mention of the eater2 was a line of thought similar to mentioning the 22-bit eater in the 68P9 article.

It's actually probably my fault that those patterns you mention have eater2s in them. It's been known for a long time that eater1s are sufficient, but for some strange reason I kept forgetting that and building new Cordership eaters using eater2s instead. When I get a chance I'll swap in eater1s for eater2s in those patterns and images, so that the confusion doesn't keep spreading. Just did an edit along those lines recently, in fact, which is probably why I was so unhappy when the article went right back the other way again. Dvgrn (talk) 20:34, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm currently planning to revert all of your latest edits to the Jason's p156 article, if I can't convince you to clean it up yourself. The article used to say

“

Jason's p156, or 92P156, is a large symmetrical oscillator found by Jason Summers on October 31, 2004 in a RandomAgar search. It is actually an eight-barrelperiod-156 glider gun (firing four close glider pairs) that is currently the smallest known at that period, with all output gliders suppressed by eater 1s.

”

and now it says

“

Jason's p156, or 92P156, is a large symmetrical oscillator (with 1,679,616 variants) found by Jason Summers on October 31, 2004 in a RandomAgar search. It is actually an eight-barrelperiod-156 glider gun (firing four close glider pairs) that is currently the smallest known at that period, with all output gliders suppressed by eater 1s.

It has 1,679,616 (68) variants, because each eater 1 can be put in six different positions. The heat can be as high as 58.7, or as low as 53.7; The volatity can reach from 94-95%, and rotor size can reach from 808 to 1000. But putting at least one of the eater 1s to the farthest distance increases the bounding box. The one shown in the infobox is the form with all of the eater 1s as close to the center as possible.

”

Trouble with the new first paragraph

Again, I'd like to strongly encourage you to resist the temptation to add tangential parenthetical phrases. If the point you want to make isn't important enough to deserve its own separate sentence, maybe it's not important enough to mess up somebody else's sentence with either.

Compare "(with 1,679,616 variants)" with the other parenthetical phrase in the article, "(firing four close glider pairs)", added by A for awesome.

The mention of the glider pairs is a clarification of the "eight-barrel gun" description that comes just before it. It was added to try to explain why Jason's p156 is an eight-barrel gun rather than an eight-glider shotgun. If you moved that parenthetical phrase to anywhere else it would make the sentence harder to understand.

There's no similarly strong reason to mention 1,679,616 variants in the middle of the first sentence. In fact it's stated again in the very next paragraph, so it's completely redundant. Removing it makes the sentence easier to understand.

Trouble with the new second paragraph

The number 1,679,616 is impressively precise but completely inaccurate. Your formula counts eight ways of moving just one eater by one cell diagonally, for example, but those would all be the exact same oscillator in different orientations. Then... I think there are actually not six but eleven eater positions for each output glider that don't change the bounding box size, because you can also use mirror-image eaters. Or if you don't mind doubling the period, you could put them in in boat-bit-catching position in lots of other ways, or use a snake or aircraft carrier instead, or there's even a way to fit an eater2 in the bounding box... and so on. Why aren't those all also variants?

Right after you give a precise-but-wrong number for variants that don't change the bounding box, you say "But putting at least one of the eater 1s to the farthest distance increases the bounding box". This makes no sense at all. If you're allowed to increase the bounding box size after all, then there are trivially an unbounded number of variants. That fact would _also_ be useless clutter if added to the article, since it's true of all multi-barrel guns with one or more suppressed barrels. You could try to calculate a number similar to 1,679,616 and add it to the period-256 glider gun, for example... but please don't!

Similarly, we could easily double the size of most of the oscillator articles on the LifeWiki by adding heat and volatility and rotor-size information for every trivial variant, just exactly like what you've added here. This would make all those articles cluttered and harder to read. All the pointless statistical stuff been banished to the infoboxes for exactly this reason: if you try to pack it into the article text it just makes a mess. And here again we wouldn't actually be able to exhaustively enumerate all the variants anyway, so the added information would be wrong as well as useless.

TL:DR; Summary

Next time you find yourself wanting to add a note in parentheses, please spend some extra time thinking about it first. Will other people who contributed to the article like your addition, or will it just look like clutter? If your addition is a new subject, make it a new sentence, or better yet a new paragraph. Don't make the edit at all unless you're sure that you're adding real information. Dvgrn (talk) 11:41, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

OKAY... I just thought it would be notable... but 90% of things I add are not notable... I might be leaving in a moment... Entity Valkyrie (talk) 03:37, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

That's a wild overestimate of the size of the problem. I've been having to clean up some detail or other in less than 20% of your edits. Obviously it would be very nice if you could slow down and pay more attention to detail, but that doesn't detract from the interesting things you come up with the other 80-90% of the time.

I know my "wall of text" messages must be painful to read sometimes, but there were a lot of wrong ideas packed into that Jason's p156 edit, so it seemed like a good textbook case to look at in detail. If you want to keep contributing to the LifeWiki, it would be really good if you could learn to recognize the problem that showed up here, so you don't keep making other people clean up after you.

Your latest edit mostly just changed 1,679,616 to 214,358,881, which is equally wrong, even when you added the clause about not increasing the population. As I mentioned above, your formula double-counts or quadruple-counts or octuple-counts most oscillator variants.

Notice that you didn't find this 214,358,881 "fact" anywhere else, you just invented it yourself. That could be a red flag for you that you're not really adding any actual information to the LifeWiki, you're just making up stuff that may just have to be taken out again.

The first and third sentences in that paragraph are still completely incorrect, and the statistics in the second sentence are based on an arbitrary limit (the bounding box) that the third sentence doesn't even seem to be respecting. And those statistics are just a lot of clutter as soon as they escape from the infobox, anyway. Removing the whole paragraph completely looks to me like the best possible improvement.

But assuming I can ever get you to agree on that point, it would be nice if you'd clean up your own mess. It doesn't make much sense for me to do the cleanup work for you, if you're just going to go on and do this same kind of thing in some other article without learning from this case. Dvgrn (talk) 19:10, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

118 would be perfectly correct if you were just calculating all permutations of possible standard eater positions inside the oscillator's bounding box. Unfortunately the great majority of those permutations are rotated and/or reflected copies of each other. Changing a pattern's orientation doesn't make it count as a different variant, unless you explicitly redefine "variant" to mean something different from what it normally means on the LifeWiki and elsewhere (Catagolue especially). Dvgrn (talk) 08:13, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I did count rotations different ones. I don't have the formula that get rid of count rotations. I've miscalculated it and changed it, but that still counts rotations as different ones. I've migrated to my own prardise now. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 01:42, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Your latest edit is summarized as "wrong number" -- and yes, 811 is definitely a step in the wrong direction, since it doesn't even calculate the number of permutations correctly. It seems like it should be clear to you that deliberately adding known wrong information is not a good idea, so I don't understand why you made that last edit.

Anyone reading the article without looking at the history -- which is most people -- will have no way of seeing that that calculation is wrong (and that you know that). The exact number of variants for that exact bounding box, period, and population is fairly arbitrary anyway, so really the article seems to be significantly improved by not bringing up the subject in the first place.

The third sentence in the paragraph is also still clearly wrong. I've asked a couple of times for you to clean up your own messes in situations like this, but the message doesn't seem to be getting through to wherever you've migrated to. I'll do the cleanup for you again, but please review all of the above comments carefully, to understand why this kind of made-up "information" is not welcome in LifeWiki articles ... whereas your other contributions are perfectly fine, like the recent tetradecathlon pattern in 34P14 shuttle.

No matter where you say you've migrated to, you're responsible for your own LifeWiki edits. A lot of people -- including you! -- have done a lot of work to make the LifeWiki a reliable source of information. As a LifeWiki administrator, part of my job is to encourage new contributions... and another part of my job is to make sure that all of that good work isn't wasted by people littering good articles with irrelevant nonsense. It only takes a small percentage of garbage information to make the whole LifeWiki much less useful, by forcing everyone to check edit history all the time to see if a given "fact" has a reliable source.

That 811 edit, combined with your non-explanation of it, makes you look like an extremely untrustworthy editor. If more edits show up along these lines, I'll probably reluctantly decide to remove the trusted flag from your LifeWiki account.

That would be a shame. Among other things, you're one of the few people who has taken the initiative to really learn how to use LifeViewer and its waypoint animation system. And you've made a lot of good and interesting contributions, including filling in missing explanations that nobody else even noticed were missing... maybe because most of us have been around here too long, and don't always notice that what's common knowledge for us may not be common knowledge for everybody. Dvgrn (talk) 14:15, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Giving EV the benefit of the doubt, I understood the 'wrong number' edit to mean 'the previous number was wrong' (which it was) rather than 'I'm inserting a wrong number' (which was also true, but hopefully not deliberate on EV's part).

Ah, that does make slightly more sense. I was really puzzled by that edit. Even with the benefit of the doubt, though, the warning still stands. It's not the best thing when a few minutes of careless editing by EV means that other editors have to waste hours cleaning up and/or trying to get some acknowledgment of the problem. See the Rich's p16 and turner cases below. Dvgrn (talk) 18:45, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Here's one more case where you seem to be not seeing or ignoring suggestions, and where you are not doing a good job of explaining your changes to other editors. This edit basically re-adds some irrelevant details that I had just removed in the previous edit. My edit summary tries to explain exactly why I reverted your changes. Your edit summary fails to explain why you're adding almost exactly the same pointless trivia back in the same location.

Instead, your edit summary contains multiple-line RLE! This is a new and truly awful way to waste other people's time. To find out what the RLE represents, it's necessary to copy it out of the edit summary, add newlines, copy it again and paste it into Golly. As expected, it turns out to be an illustration of three of the alternate still lifes that can be uselessly substituted for the snake interaction that's described in the footnote link. You've put this RLE in a place that makes it very hard for anyone to ever see the pattern. Why?

We've been over this point several times before, so for the last time: whenever an infinite number of trivially equivalent variants are available, it makes zero sense to waste space in the article documenting some random subset of those variants. You didn't mention shillelaghs, canoes of various lengths, hats, or any of the other possible substitutions. You can't possibly mention them all, and this should be a big clue that you're on a slippery slope that you shouldn't have started down in the first place.

If the aircraft-carrier-and-eater edit still looks like a good idea to you, please explain why as clearly as possible. If not, please revert it. Dvgrn (talk) 15:22, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

And while you're fixing things, your latest change to turner has added three new problems without improving much of anything. One, you removed the wording about the third line of the stamp collection, so now the splitters on the third line are described as if they're on the second line. It still says "two highway-robbing splitters", but now there are three splitters there. The splitter that you added again is one I've removed twice now. I explained at the time why I removed it: it is not a highway-robbing splitter, it's just a regular splitter. There are hundreds of regular splitters with two small still lifes. Why is it so important that this particular one get added to the turners stamp collection?

You could leave the splitter in if the "highway-robbing" description is removed... but highway-robbing splitters are actually pretty rare, unlike regular splitters, so it seems like a good idea to have actual highway-robbing splitters in the collection, and to mention that fact.

Either way, please fix your mistakes, or revert the article and RLE changes. If you can't avoid making this many careless mistakes, I'd suggest you take a break from LifeWiki editing until you're able to slow down and proofread your work. Dvgrn (talk) 16:32, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Two problems out of three were fixed by the last edit, which is at least a good majority. Thank you. I took out the horribly slow splitter that I had added -- it was sort of a desperate attempt to make the article make sense, but it wasn't a good idea -- I got stuck making everything be a highway robber, but that wasn't really necessary. I've added some things that hopefully are good ideas instead, especially labels for the various categories in the stamp collection, so that it should be easier now to figure out what the text is talking about. Dvgrn (talk) 16:06, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

A few of us have been confused about your creation of this page yesterday (which has since been moved to your userspace). I'm not sure whether it was intended to be a redirect (as implied by the "Main article:" thing at the top which can't be clicked on) or an actual article for a different pattern, albeit extremely unfinished, as the viewer on the right would indicate, and I personally would like to hear an explanation about what you were trying to do here. Ian07 (talk) 00:53, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

I was trying to make a so-called "manual redirect", which doesn't directly redirect to the heavyweight emulator page, but when I meant the "page under the article n", I was confused that some people would see the pattern in the infobox, instead of the more accessible one on the bottom. That's why I made this page as a bridge to the other page but tell then it is this oscillator not the other one. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 00:57, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Based on several people's very confused reaction to the creation of that page, it's probably a lot safer to stick to making standard redirects and articles and other types of pages that already exist. That page was quite a puzzle, so it definitely didn't get your intended message across. It looked more like you might have been planning to do some more editing after putting in a temporary placeholder.

It might be helpful to other editors if you could get in the habit of putting a quick description of each of your edits in the edit summary line, especially in cases like this one. Leaving those summaries blank just guarantees that everyone has to go and look at each edit in context to figure out what you're doing. The more you can let other people know what you're thinking, the more this collaborative editing project can become a team effort instead of a lot of faintly unpleasant micro-arguments.

Also, of course, "p4 heavyweight volcano" is a name you made up yourself, and then created a LifeWiki page under that name. I guess this isn't really a clear case where the Three-Step Checklist applies, since you were probably just trying to make a generic description of that sparker.

However, according to the common definition, volcanoes are period 5. David Eppstein did call something a "p6 volcano" back in 2000, and you have a "p6 heavyweight volcano" in your Template:SparkerNavbox. But it's not clear to me why the use of "volcano" should be extended to non-p5 periods, or why the "heavyweight" reference should be used for non-p4 periods. Why not just use something safe and generic like "p6 domino sparker"? Dvgrn (talk) 18:24, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

The LW/MW/HW prefices have been used for volcanoes since antiquity. Also, a heavyweight spark isn't merely a domino spark; it's a horizontal domino spark flanked by two dots (and analogously for middleweight and lightweight).

But certainly 'Volcano' refers to a period-5 oscillator, and I recall the 'V' in 'Volcano' was chosen to coincide with the Roman numeral for 5. (Note that this is not to be interpreted as a suggestion to move the page to 'heavyweight ivolcano'.) Calcyman (talk) 19:23, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Removing trusted flag from account

As per the warning above, I reluctantly removed the trusted flag from your account this morning, in response to this edit. Edit wars are no fun at all, and it has been incredibly time-consuming for me to try to explain why these kinds of edits are not welcome -- with or without the mismatched parentheses. The Rich's p16 section above, and the edit summary comments immediately before your edit, should have been enough to prevent you from attempting to start an edit war here.

I'm sorry to have to take this step, but I'm honestly out of time. There is no other editor of the LifeWiki for whom I have to carefully read every edit to make sure there's no subtle damage being done to the articles being edited. There has been considerable discussion in other places about the difficulties you've been causing for other editors, and there's a developing consensus that it's just too difficult for everyone to keep up.

However: thank you very much for all the good work you've done here! Nobody else has really stepped up and pushed the boundaries of LifeViewer use the way you have, and you've added a lot of patterns and information that needed to be added.
Between your work and other people's cleanup I think you've had a strong positive influence on the LifeWiki. We just can't handle such a large uncontrolled flood of ideas without falling behind in the cleanup. Now is a good time for everyone to get a break from all the explaining and re-editing. Dvgrn (talk) 14:00, 26 February 2019 (UTC)